The role of design in our work
We rely on design to help us provide people with a good experience in public space. We also believe that thoughtful design conveys respect for our community hosts. Over the years we’ve worked with architects, industrial designers, fabricators, and architecture students to develop pop-up infrastructure that we use all across New York City. We’ve also made and shipped the same infrastructure to organizations and agencies in other cities across the globe. In 2022, we hired our first Design Lead and another Designer, bringing design capacity in-house.
We are always looking for ways to generate new pop-up designs for the public realm and share the work of architects with neighborhoods across the city. If you are a designer, architect, or fabricator and want to partner with us to put something great on the street, contact Leslie Davol.
A brief history of our collaborations with designers:
The first design we put into use consisted of a series of angular cubes that could be stacked to make a bookcase, held in place by magnets, with yellow protrusions that could double as benches. It was designed by architects Höweler + Yoon and built by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Professor J. Meejin Yoon (of Howeler + Yoon) in 2011. The project was featured in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, and won an A+ Architizer award in the learning category.
Launched on Kickstarter:
Working with Bill Bancroft Furniture Design in 2015 and 2016, we then made further adaptations to this cart design, adding additional programs and developing custom solutions for partners.
In 2018, working closely again with Bill Bancroft, we developed designs for moveable tables and material storage units based on Tangram puzzle pieces.
Design and fabrication credits
- Höweler + Yoon Architecture (Eric Höweler, Meejin Yoon, Parker Lee, Ryan Murphy, Thena Tak, James Coleman, David Costanza, Jeremy Jih, and Alexander William Marshall, Kelly Shaw, Sung Woo Jang, Max Wong, Joanna Rodriguez-Noyola, Cyrus Dochow, Parker Lee).
- Joana Torres/Oficina Design
- Bill Bancroft Furniture
- Jaywalk Studio
- Büro Koray Duman
- Open Architecture NY and team led by Hannah Berkin-Harper
- Hannah Berkin-Harper